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19 November 2012

Paul Krugman: The Twinkie Manifesto

The Twinkie ... will forever be identified with the 1950s... And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time.

Needless to say, it wasn't really innocent. But the '50s ... do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. ... Consider the question of tax rates on the wealthy. The modern American right, and much of the alleged center, is obsessed with the notion that low tax rates at the top are essential to growth. ...

Yet in the 1950s ... taxes on corporate profits were twice as large... The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent ... paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.

Nor were high taxes the only burden wealthy businessmen had to bear. They also faced a labor force with a degree of bargaining power hard to imagine today. In 1955 roughly a third of American workers were union members. In the biggest companies, management and labor bargained as equals...

Squeezed between high taxes and empowered workers, executives were relatively impoverished by the standards of either earlier or later generations. ... Between the 1920s and the 1950s real incomes for the richest Americans fell sharply...

Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants and yachts are back, bigger than ever — and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats' style is met with cries of "socialism." ... Surely, then, the far less plutocrat-friendly environment of the 1950s must have been an economic disaster, right? ...

On the contrary,... the high-tax, strong-union decades after World War II were in fact marked by spectacular, widely shared economic growth...

Which brings us back to the nostalgia thing.

There are, let's face it, some people in our political life who pine for the days when minorities and women knew their place, gays stayed firmly in the closet and congressmen asked, "Are you now or have you ever been?" The rest of us, however, are very glad those days are gone. We are, morally, a much better nation... Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.

Along the way, however, we've forgotten something important — namely, that economic justice and economic growth aren't incompatible. America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share; it gave workers the power to bargain for decent wages and benefits; yet contrary to right-wing propaganda..., it prospered. And we can do that again.